Friday, February 6, 2015

So on Thursday, the President spoke at a National Prayer breakfast. In the speech he said these words:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human
history. And lest we get on our high
horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the
Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of
Christ. In our home country, slavery and
Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India -- an
incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity -- but a place
where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been
targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their
beliefs -- acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who
helped to liberate that nation.

This, of course, sent the right wing crazy, but also several on the
left. They scream that the President was
making a moral equivalency between ISIS and Christianity. They said it was an attack on all
Christians. They said he was ignorant of
the Crusades and mentioned that they were efforts to fight Muslims
terrorists. It was quite
remarkable. But what they are missing is
the simple fact that the President was right.
The simple fact is that the actions of ISIS are a perversion of Islam
that is not unlike perversions of other faith traditions that led to atrocities
throughout history and up to very recently.
To paint all of Islam with the brush dipped in the blood shed by ISIS is
silly and as silly as holding today’s Christian’s responsible for the
Crusades. But let’s be clear. Even if you could make the argument that the
Crusades were about fighting to take back land in the Middle East considered
Holy to the European Christians who went to fight the Arabs there, one cannot
explain how the killing of Jews along the way was justifiable and not a
Christian mob who saw themselves doing God’s work. The President is simply pointing out in this speech
that we must be cautious of how we see groups like ISIS and how we generalize
them to all of Islam, or even argue that Islam somehow supports this kind of
brutality.

But the noise machine and others will have none of it. They will tell you what the President thought
and how he hates Christianity and how he is making an excuse for ISIS. But that is not the truth. But truth and the noise machine are not
friends. In fact they conveniently
ignore that he brought up civil rights in the equation so that they can so
easily dismiss the clear evil that was part of the Crusades or the Inquisition
as being over 600 years ago. But what
they won’t address is that it was Christian teaching that led many to not
question slavery or even Jim Crowe in our nation’s history. A history that is troubled and rarely fully
addressed. Funny story, at the same time
there were preachers in pulpits saying things like enslaving savage Africans
will break their will and they will find salvation, there were many in the pulpit
using the same text to condemn the institution of slavery. And that is what the President was alluding
to in his speech. That religion can be
the lever to move people and that is can be manipulated to do evil and justify
it as sacred.

Ta-Nehesi Coates, writing today in The Atlantic says:

Now,
Christianity did not "cause" slavery, any more than Christianity
"caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost
always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims
terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian
enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

Mr. Coates points out correctly that the analogy is not only solid, but
important to any discussion about religions role in defeating the evil that is
ISIS. Going back to the imagery of the
Crusades and frankly the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, it was often
Christian leaders who called for mass killings and their followers who would
carry it out. Jews were slaughtered in
many places simply for being Jews, this time of year, near Purim and Pesach
that almost always coincides with Lent and Easter, priests would rile up crowds
to descend on the Jews in a town to punish them simply for a different
faith. It used made up stories of Jews
murdering Christian children, known as the blood libel, to make Matzah or
Hamantaschen and the murderers truly felt they were making the world better
through purging of the infidels in their midst.
Sound familiar?

But we need not look back 600 years.
Near where I grew up in Massena, NY in 1928, a young girl went missing a
few days before Yom Kippur and the city officials were convinced the Jews had
ritually sacrificed her. When it was
later discovered that she got lost and fell asleep in the woods (easy to do in
the region even today when you get outside of town) people still believed
this. But this blood libel is alive and
well today in many places including among the Christians of Poland according to
a 2008 study.

Christian actions and words have led to horrors in the past that can’t
simply be ignored while holding all of Islam responsible for the actions of the
lunatic death cult called ISIS.

The President was simply pointing out these Middle East thugs are not a
novel invention in human history and we must be careful of how much we draw
from their invoking the name of God in their actions. We can so easily generalize their actions to
all Muslims or think that this is the definition of Islam and that somehow that
is waiting for us from all Muslim. So
instead of being outraged that the President addressed the issue in a strong
way, perhaps you should use this to open up dialogue to address the real
issues. That religion can be used to
commit horrors beyond imagine in the name of God, and that this must be
stopped. The best way is to promote
freedom and take religion out of the hands of civil authority and to focus on
not trying to demonize an entire faith, but understand the struggle that faith
is going through as the radical members have created such a powerful
profile. Want to screw with an Islamic
radical, invite a Muslim to your seder or your child’s baptism. Each and every faith evolves as it matures and
goes through its own form of enlightenment.
We are living in the time of that struggle in Islam. But what we must
understand that while the words are different and the prayers have another language
this is not new and that is what the President was saying. It may be hard to hear, but it will help in
the long run to combat the radicals. But
that will only happen if we recognize them for what they are, and that they are
not unique in the grand scheme of things.